You Are The Only One

Prouvost draws on the strange, daily, deictic assault of contemporary language in the same way, savouring the unasked-for intimacy of a faux-personal spam message or a threatening chain letter. These ridiculous demands nonetheless inflict tiny fractures on our sense of separateness and self- containment. We cannot rid ourselves of the residual hope that these carpet-bombing come-ons are really for us, rather than, as Marks & Spencers once put it, “exclusively for everyone.” But for Prouvost’s confiding personas, the desire for such a sense of connection constantly spills over: a reverie over an orphaned photo spirals off into conjecture and towards the further reaches of empathy, pathological projection.